226 Quotes About Coping

Close your eyes, real tight, and then count to three hundred. That’s all you have to do. You just count to three hundred, and when you open your eyes, five minutes will have passed. And even if it hurts or things are shitty or you don’t know what to do, you just made it through five whole minutes. And when it feels like you can’t go on, you just close your eyes and do it again. That’s all you need. Just five minutes at a time.

The strength to go on must come from within, not without, or it crushes instead of building up the heart.

She said once that time is nothing to me but a series of bookmarks that I use to jump back and forth through the text of my life, returning again and again to the events that mark me in the eyes of my more astute colleagues, as bearing all the characteristics of the classic melancholic.

Yet it seems like the more abuse I get, the more abuse I court - baring myself more extravagantly, processing opinions that I know will draw an onslaught - because, after all, if I've already adjusted my body temperature, why not face the blizzard so that other women don't have to freeze?Paradoxical undressing, I guess.

When you're feeding the second coachload of tourists that day you aren't thinking about the birthday party for fifty next week.

Don't cry about it. Write about it.

It's okay to be absurd, ridiculous, and downright irrational at times; silliness is sweet syrup that helps us swallow the bitter pills of life.

We all do strange things to keep ourselves from dying. And when it comes down to it, love, no one knows which of those things might lead us back to life.

It was painful to contemplate the distance between the future of accomplishment I'd imagined for myself twenty years earlier...it was painful to understand that the cushion of exceptionality invoked by the drug had made me oblivious to my inertia. And it was painful to have to define myself again, at an age when most people are happy in their own skins.